"The war on meat has been gathering pace among our Western elites. ... in the interests of quelling climate change...
The IPCC’s AR5 estimated the global warming caused by a tonne of livestock methane would be 28 times that of a tonne of carbon dioxide.
All this is now challenged by a new and authoritative research paper, Allen et al (2017): “A solution to the misrepresentations of CO2-equivalent emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, under ambitious mitigation”.
This paper finds that conventional GWPs misrepresent the impact of short-lived gases (such as methane) on global temperature... because a steady-state herd of cattle can add very little to global warming.
Methane has a half-life in the atmosphere of only about six years – so that every new molecule added is offset by the expiry of a molecule emitted by that herd a few years earlier.
“Traditional greenhouse gas accounting ignores the impact of changing methane emission rates while grossly exaggerating the impact of steady methane emissions”.
And – “Climate policy the world over has traditionally treated every tonne of methane as supposedly “equivalent” to 28 tonnes of carbon dioxide…
It isn’t.
All this is now challenged by a new and authoritative research paper, Allen et al (2017): “A solution to the misrepresentations of CO2-equivalent emissions of short-lived climate pollutants, under ambitious mitigation”.
This paper finds that conventional GWPs misrepresent the impact of short-lived gases (such as methane) on global temperature... because a steady-state herd of cattle can add very little to global warming.
Methane has a half-life in the atmosphere of only about six years – so that every new molecule added is offset by the expiry of a molecule emitted by that herd a few years earlier.
“Traditional greenhouse gas accounting ignores the impact of changing methane emission rates while grossly exaggerating the impact of steady methane emissions”.
And – “Climate policy the world over has traditionally treated every tonne of methane as supposedly “equivalent” to 28 tonnes of carbon dioxide…
It isn’t.
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